


I Know of Heaven by the Line at its Gate (the Cleanup Crew Remix)

by sunsmasher



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Blood, Character Death, F/M, Gen, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, blatant misuse of the phrase mortal coil, some gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-22
Updated: 2013-03-22
Packaged: 2017-12-06 03:20:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/730926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Earth looks beautiful, like most things do, before its death.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I Know of Heaven by the Line at its Gate (the Cleanup Crew Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [anthrop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/gifts).
  * Inspired by [if it dont speak in tongue](https://archiveofourown.org/works/448306) by [anthrop](https://archiveofourown.org/users/anthrop/pseuds/anthrop). 



Dave shoves his hands into the wreck, cuts his arms open on the metal and screams, “It’s OK! God, kid, it’s OK!”

The girl he’s reaching for is sliced open like a cardboard box meant for the curb, and a tuk-tuk burns past him and the two crashed cars and the screaming.  Bangladesh sinks in its own heat, suffocates in bright gray humidity, and the noise of it all could kill you, is about to kill him. Dave dives further into twisted metal, burning hot, shouting in a language this kid may never have heard, and the girl blinks slowly up at him as blood washes over her eyes. A man in the other car bellows in pain.

“Don’t look, don’t look, don’t look,” he chants as he pulls the kid out over her dead sister, blood and sweat mixing in the fabric of his shirt as he clutches the girl to his chest. “Don’t look, kid, just eyes on me, just keep that pretty face fixed on mine, you got that, nothing in the world better looking than me, nothing to see but my gorgeous Texan visage.”

The girl laughs, a little bubble of blood at the corner of her mouth, and no doubt it’s shock (the things Dave can feel sliding wet against his shirt), but Dave smiles back because there’s no use pretending it isn’t the most important thing in the world. “We’re gonna be fine, yo!” he laughs, twisting, looking for anywhere to go that isn’t a burning intersection. “We’re gonna be fine as hell, ladies will be wilting at our levels of fine-itude, just swooning in the damn streets, yeah?”

There’s a crowd waving to him from the sidewalk, taut faces calling him over, gesturing to the wheeling lights of an ambulance, and Dave can actually almost believe it when he laughs, “You’re gonna be fine, little—“

 

_“And then the truck,” she offers._

_“Yeah,” he sighs. “And then the goddamn truck.”_

 

Blood flakes off in chips and splinters from his neck, spinning out away from her and him and the star combusting before them in the black tracts of space. Aradia suspects there’s char dribbling from the hole in her heart, as well, but it’s not worth investigating. She has her responsibilities.

The way Dave rolls his stump of an arm, back tensing beneath the rusted red of his shirt, she can tell he’s remembering the truck. The way he flexes his remaining fingers, barely more than a twitch of ligament, she can tell he’s remembering the kid, or the body. So she fits her left hand into his right and lays a solid pap across his cheek. Solemnly she says to his bloodless face, “Dave.”

“Yes, Aradia,” he replies, and there’s a hint of sarcasm about that last word, like he’s trying to play the petulant child to her mother hen, but it’s weak of spirit and woozy of will.

Aradia says, “You’re an idiot.”

He looks a bit less like he’s decided to dig a hole in his head and think himself to death in it, and says, “Is that so.”

“Yup,” she replies. “Look both ways before crossing the street, you dumbass.”

He manages a tired snort and a grim smile but he doesn’t pull his hand from hers so she considers her duty fulfilled. When he leans against her shoulder, she stands still for him in the vacuum and listens to the garbled, silent notes of her music box as the Earth’s surface dries. A billion years pass in the turning of its gears and the lithosphere goes molten as the sun’s atmosphere expands. Dave’s turntables whir at his sides and a red dwarf blooms within the solar system. Earth is barren as its moons and livid with magma. The two ghosts watch it die.

Dave asks, “So how’d you kick the entirely non-sexual cleaning implement this time around?”

Aradia shifts against his shoulder, almost a shrug. “Not very heroically. Some bitch shot me in the outer systems. Probably thought I owed her money.”  

“Oh,” Dave says, then “huh.”

There’s still contact, his body pressed to hers from hip to shoulder and her hand clutched in his, but he doesn’t look to her. The sun engulfs its planets, and she sees mass extinction reflected in red light across his face. “Can’t always die a legend,” he mutters, and Aradia smiles, only slightly bitterly and mostly to herself.

“Nope,” she agrees. “Sometimes you just die.”

He nods and she’s good at this, she’s spent many, many deaths in his company. She sees the wheels turn. A solar flare marks his small epiphany.

“ ‘Aight,” he says, and rolls his shoulders. The stump of his left arm was cauterized some time in the three billion years between his death and their present conversation, and he doesn’t seem to mind its loss. The turntables spin on, unaffected. “Time to play street sweeper. Get some of the spacetime janitorial staff in here, clean up the chronologically aberrant corpses we left behind. Nothing stains an alpha timeline like dead Daves you know? You can never get the fucking smell out.”

The smile hasn’t left her lips, and though he’s pulled away from her in inches and centimeters, his hand is still tied in hers. “You dummy,” she says, and she’s not sure who the smile is meant for at this point, herself or him, “there’s only alpha timelines, now. You’re just alpha dead.”

“Fuck you,” he laughs, “If I’m alpha dead you’ve been alpha conscripted into cleaning up my alpha fucking corpse. Ten bucks and a hole in your head says dispatching my fresh cadaver will take four, maybe five times as much weird time shit as yours.”

“You’re probably right!” she says. “Where I’m laid to rest no one will find me, not for sweeps and sweeps and sweeps. Your meat puppet takes priority.”

Dave snorts and takes his hand from her, splaying his freed fingers across the time-drenched vinyl. As Aradia looks away from him, to her bloodless hands and the gears of her music boxes, her face sets. There are lines between her brows and at the corners of her mouth, and she pushes the fourth dimension into melody.

Time jumps and skips, the earth thriving and burning in billion-year harmony as she pulls back from this off-shot, swiftly-dying dimension. The music of the life and death of the spheres pounds in her ears. In the scant seconds/centuries in which the earth appears green and growing before her, she’s glad she’ll be able to see at least a fraction of its life before she dies. It looks beautiful, like most things do, before its death.

-

The cement is old and cracked, radiating heat up through the soles of Aradia’s shoes. Dave flickers into view in the corner of her eye, crackling red at the edges and blue at the curves. She allows herself one moment of warmth and wind as her hair begins to stiffen in the humidity, sweat beginning to form where her arms press against her sides, then she pulls a melody from the music boxes and time snaps shut. The traffic stops, the screaming stops, and the ground beneath her feet slowly grows cold. A vendor at her cart stalls mid-hawk, open-mouthed and gesturing wide, and Dave steps into the street. There was wind before she slipped out of time, and the taste of thunderstorms, a man’s hat frozen in its tumble down the street.

Dave’s corpse lies on its side, some small distance from the body of the child. Its arm up to the elbow still touches her. The wreck to their right is covered in stills of flames. The street to their left is covered in people, arms outstretched and weight shifting forward. Dave, the dead Dave who moves and breathes because he hasn’t yet forgotten how, kneels down beside his mortal coil and places a hand on its chest. Time hitches. His hand tightens in its shirt, and it jumps, the only motion besides their own featured in this picture. The face skitters into another, bones shift, skin lightens. The body is another, and with her hands upon the threads of time and space, Aradia eases the knots of paradox out. A man never born in this timeline will never be anything but a John Doe.

“Cool,” Dave says, his turntables floating back against his sides as he rises from the asphalt. He doesn’t look at the child in his arm ten feet away. “So let’s go pick up your rotting shell and make our pretty way to the cosmic Way Out sign. I’ve died a hell of a lot for someone of my tender years, I’m starting to get pumped about this whole ‘Meaning of Life’ thing I got coming to me.”

“Not that I don’t love a good corpse party,” Aradia says, stepping forward to look down at the man who looks just enough like Dave, “But, yeah, we’ve served our time. Our duties have been discharged. Let’s go.”

Dave nods, and there’s the feeling of bass in their bones as he drags his hands across vinyl. Aradia’s gray fingers tap against the crystal of her music boxes, and the world begins to flicker, Bangladesh-Outer Systems-Bangladesh-Outer Systems. The clutter and heat begins to peel away, burning sun darkening and lowering, and the bass drops out. Dave shouts, “Wait!”

Aradia freezes, melody still twisting and pulling beneath her hands. Dave’s frozen, looking behind her, and she loves him, he loves her, but she wants to go. Her time is up, her number come in, and now she wants out. She wants her final due. But Dave moves past her, a frown peeling his face, and she twists at the waist to follow his gaze.

There is a child behind her, and she shifts and weeps and clutches her elbows in a world without time. A question forms in her mouth, and Dave asks for her, “What the fuck?”

There’s a special brand of confusion in Dave’s face as he crouches in front of the crying girl. Aradia untwists again, then back, and sees the same face mirrored a hundred feet apart. Dave attempts to wipe the tears from the cheek of the girl he couldn’t save, and his hand stalls en route. Poker faces are hard to come by in death.

The girl’s chest hitches. Aradia’s seen less pain in Dave’s face during any number of his final moments, and lets her music boxes drop to her sides as she walks towards them. The girl’s caught sight of her own body and the tears intensify as Dave finally manages contact and engulfs her shoulder in his hand. “It’s OK,” he says, trying to sound laughing, “It’s OK, girlfriend, it’s OK as OK can be.”

Aradia shifts her weight to the other foot, eyes the stopped shape of the crowds, and asks, “What’s wrong?”

She almost laughs at the shock on Dave’s face, sudden as a bird meeting a window, but decides it wouldn’t help. She taps her fingers against her thigh and says again, “We should go before someone finds my meat puppet, does nasty things to my corpse.”

Dave turns back to the girl for a moment, pushes her hair out of her face as he tells her something simple and calm. She hiccups and unclenches a little, and Dave says, “We have to help her, Aradia.”

He’s still watching her, smiling at her, and of all the expressions Aradia’s seen him wear, this is the most familiar. She puts a hand on his shoulder, little more than fingers against the fabric of his shirt, and replies with a sigh, “Or we could just go. The girl’s as dead as they come, and these people will make sure her body isn’t eaten by the dogs. I’d like to go, please.”

Dave shrugs her hand off and stands. He keeps his one hand on the girl’s shoulder, which seems unnecessary as she’s attached herself to his leg. There’s no great heat left in the unmoving air, and Aradia can’t tell if she’s hot or cold as he replies, “You’re fucking kidding me. She obviously doesn’t know what to do, we’re not leaving her here.”

Aradia shifts again, lifting a shoulder in half a shrug. “She’s not our responsibility,” she says, not looking away from his gaze. She thinks he might be expecting her to. “The dead aren’t our problem. Not that the living are, either, but I guess we keep making them our problem. But she’s not. Just leave her, Dave, we have to go.”

“Hell no,” he shoots back, and she’s surprised at his anger. His hand tightens around the girl. “She’s not supposed to be here, and you fucking know it. We’re not leaving her alone with her own goddamn body.”

“And why not? She’s dead, we’re dead, there’s nothing we can do. It’s only a body.”

“We’ll show her how to pass on,” Dave says, and she can tell he’s only come up with this in the saying of it. His back is too straight and his mouth too set for anything but the conviction born of desperate improvisation.

“And how are we gonna do that, brainiac?” she shoots back, crossing her arms across her chest.

Dave pauses, eyes suddenly looking up and to her left, and says, “Uh.”

Because that’s the thing. There’s no knowing what comes next for the living, and there’s no knowing what comes next for the dead. Some doors have no keyholes through which to look, some walls can’t be peeked over.

“We don’t know any more than her, Dave,” she says, and she pities this boy to the ends of the multiverse, she really does. “We really, really, can’t help her. We’re only wasting time.”

“I, just,” Dave begins, and he swallows like there’s too many words in his mouth. “How can you not even try? She’s fucking terrified, look at her.”

She does. The girl is small, with a round face and thick hair, and Aradia can’t tell what color her shirt was for all the blood.  

“We’re heroes of time,” he says, and Aradia freezes down to her spine. “We have to—”

“No,” she snaps, and drops her arms from her chest. The music boxes begin to hum, just at the higher edge of hearing, and for a half of a half of second Aradia can feel wind and heat at her back. “We don’t have to do shit. We are not heroes of time. We are dead, Dave. Not even that, because out there somewhere are a Dave and Aradia alive and kicking, and they’re the heroes of time, not us. I know you’re upset about not saving this girl when you were alive, but fucking around here isn’t going to change anything. Let’s go. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Dave goes stony, and this is a face she’s seen but never before meant for her. “Go if you want,” he says, and if he was Rose he would have spat it, but he’s not so he just sounds a bit sad. “If I don’t catch up with you before you find the way out, I’m sure I’ll see you around someplace. It’s a small afterlife.”

He turns away from her and her music boxes and the way she stands with her feet apart and her hands at her sides, and kneels again to smile at the girl. The girl is still crying, slower now and with fewer hiccups, but when Dave asks her name, she mumbles back, “Amena.”

“Amena,” he repeats, still smiling, and she wipes her nose with one hand as she nods.

Aradia doesn’t move. Nor does she fume, or deflate, or feel anything else, because that low, slow burn of frustration is all she knows to do right now. She didn’t expect anything else was possible, but Dave couldn’t fake the sincerity in his grin if he tried.

“And you can understand me, Amena?” he asks, and when she nods he adds, “Well, chalk one up to the linguistic mojo that be,” with a chuckle.

He settles back on his heels, amid the crowded-in buildings and a screaming crowd put on pause, and says to the girl, “So what if you imagined a road.”

Amena watches his face, rapt and almost mirroring his broad smile. “And the road,” he says, “Is real goddamn long, with not much on either side, but you can see clear to the horizon and you know there’s something waiting at the end, something just for you. Think you can see imagine that road for me?”

She nods, very slowly, and Aradia sighs. “It’s not going to work,” she says, and Dave very deliberately ignores her. “Now this road,” he starts again, and Aradia cuts in, “—It’s a door.”

Now Dave looks to her, and raises a delicate eyebrow like he’s surprised she’s still here. This is dumb, and they both know it. “Death’s not a road,” Aradia continues, her feet taking her to his side. She kneels beside him now, too, one hand at his shoulder and another bracing against the tepid ground. “Life’s the road. Life is long and grueling and you don’t know what’s at the end until you get there. On the whole it can kinda suck ass. But now you’ve gotten to the end,” she tells the girl, who doesn’t seem to mind the long curl of Aradia’s horns or her pale yellow eyes. “And you can see that there’s a door waiting for you. Do you know what’s behind it?”

The girl shakes her head.

“Good,” Aradia says, and she can feel Dave relax an inch into her hand. She doesn’t smile, but he does, and it seems to work. “We’re not supposed to know, not until we put our hands on the handle and open it. But the door’s there.”

“It’s here, too” Dave says, and begins to trace a line high in the air. “Here’s the edge,” he says, finger trailing Amena’s gaze along behind it. “And here’s the keyhole,” he says, tracing a circle just below eye level. “And here’s the handle,” he says, tracing a bigger circle just above. “See it there? Just the right size for you, kid, no heavy hinges to pull or steps to climb. All you have to do is turn the knob.”

She nods again, and the way her eyes move over the air between them, they know she sees something they don’t. She puts a hand forward, towards the doorknob Dave traced in space, and freezes. “Will it,” she whispers, “will it hurt?”

“No!” Dave says, instantly, then softer, “No. Nothing will hurt, not ever again. I swear.”

“Hurting is for the road,” Aradia says, voice no louder than his, no louder than their shifting against each other in the deep silence of the time stop. “But you’ve left that all behind you. Now you’ve just got to the open the door, and then you can leave.”

Amena, nods again, nods with purpose, tear tracks fresh against her skin. She puts her hand to the doorknob is meant to be and her palm deforms around some solid form Aradia can’t see.

She disappears.

Time blooms.

There’s a moment of disconnect, that jar when the audio’s too slow behind the visual and it all feels off, but then the world snaps together and Aradia’s bowled over by a woman running for the burning wreck where three bodies lie bleeding. She yelps, hands flying to cover her neck as she skids against the road and the heat of Bangladesh bursts around her. Sound rushes in, brutal and shrieking as flames meet screams meet traffic, and when she gasps for breath, it comes thick with the smells of charred meat and oxidized metals. Dave roars from somewhere near and in the next breath she launches up, losing skin to the rough old asphalt in exchange for traction and torque. “Dave!” she shouts back, stabbing through the press with elbows and horns. A knee meets her, a hip checks her into a streetlight, and then Dave’s there, at the same streelight, grabbing her hand and shouting over the crowd, “Mother of fuck, Megido, have we ever got to book it.”

He points her down an alleyway, cool and blue and buried deep in its shade, and they run.

\--

Some dizzy number of turns later, they stop running.

“What the fuck just happened?” Aradia gasps, but Dave isn’t so much breathing as chanting “holy shit holy shit holy shit” with every dreg of air left in his lungs. It takes a minute of desperate inhaling for him to answer, “I have not a single shitlicking idea. All ideas have flown the coop, all shit has been licked, the official shitlicking idea season has come to a disastrous end, words will be had with Fish and Shitlicking Wildlife over this one.”  

There’s a pause while he regains breath post-analogy. Finally, “I didn’t break the fucking stop, did you?”

“Nope,” she replies, ears still pounding and legs still thrumming. “That was not me.”

“Well,” says a voice, and Dave yelps and Aradia spins. The woman behind them is tall and gray-skinned and a well-loved scarf covers the long curl of her horns. “That’s almost true.”

“Oh, fuck this,” Dave wheezes, and sits his ass right down.

Aradia keeps to her feet, music boxes humming into existence at her sides in lieu of real weaponry. “They can touch us!” she shouts, “They knocked us down, kicked us around, and we’re dead! Some vulture’s no doubt already got their dick in my corpse, out rotting the next galaxy over, so how can they touch us?”

Aradia’s mad, tense, the act of living granting life to the emotions she’s always kept at low heat and cooking slow since she died, every time she died. Living is bright and vivid, and she’d appreciate it more if she wasn’t so fucking pissed.

The woman, who has grown into her horns and her nose and the breadth of her shoulders in her time, laughs. It’s the sound of laughing-at, not laughing-with, Aradia can tell, but not meant with cruelty. “Think of this as a trial period,” Aradia’s older self says, resting a hand on Aradia’s shoulder. Aradia deeply considers shrugging it off, but she’s not sure she could live any version of herself if she summoned that kind of petulance. “You two dorks have got a choice, now, and it wasn’t one that could be made in the middle of a timestop. Probably best to do it away from Dave’s meat puppet, too,” she adds, with a nod to Dave. Dave gives her a wave, then drops his face into his hands. He doesn’t seem to have noticed yet that he has two.

“What kind of choice,” Aradia says, still wary. She’s put a hand to her chest and can feel it smooth and whole, no gunshot or blackened skin.

“What you did for Amena,” the woman says, “that was step one. And I gotta hand it to you, you guys did pretty well. I’ve seen it go a lot worse, you know?”

“You’ve seen it before?” Dave asks, looking up from his slouch against the alley wall. From the way his newly-returned fingers curl in and out of fists, Aradia can tell he’s only freaking a little. “Don’t tell me she’s died more than once.”

“Not at all!” the older Aradia smiles, settling where she stands. One hand goes to her hip, another scratches at the base of her horn. “Amena, sweet thing, that was her first and only death. You two got her through just fine, so we won’t see her again. I mean I’ve watched other copies of you two, other remnants of your deaths, go about it a bit less gracefully.”

“More Daves,” he deadpans. “And more Aradias.” The alley’s still as dim as the first, a thin line of burning sunlight painting the ground between the shadows of the eaves above. Dave shifts, and his shoe is caught in sharp relief.

“Of course,” the older Aradia replies, and before he can produce some cynical quip about dead Daves, and they can all three feel it coming, she says, “There’s something about you two! You always seem to find lingering ghosts while playing cleanup crew, some lost soul who can’t make it through the door. And sometimes you two show the way, and sometimes, unfortunately you don’t. Sometimes it’s Dave who dies lost and alone and for no good reason, and he’s the one who threatens to leave. Sometimes you yourselves just pass on.”

“So what we did,” Aradia says, slowly, sounding the concepts out to herself piece by piece, “that was passing the test.”

“Absolutely!”

“What test,” and that’s Dave and Aradia together, one step out of unison.

“Think of it as a placement exam. What you did for Amena, you could do that again, from here until Death wraps this whole universe up and turns off the lights on her way out. Show people how to get where they need to be. It’s not a bad job, as these things go!”

There had been a hint of relaxation to Aradia, a growing—if not comfort, then ease. But at “job” she bristles, curves inwards around the center and growls, “I don’t take jobs—” but her older self cuts her off and says, face suddenly serious and smooth as ice, “Not that kind of job. Never again that kind of job. No masters, no chains, no metal hearts. You choose this yourself, and if you want, you can choose when to go. Does that sound alright?”

Aradia pauses, a bit of the heat going out of her as Dave pipes up, “Yo, does this swagass deal apply to me, too, or is this a Megidos-only affair, because I see no hot Dave hanging around.”

The older troll laughs, and Aradia does a little, too, a short burst of giggle in the shade. “Yes, dingus, it applies to you, too. My more handsome half is running around somewhere, but you will give your answer to me. Would like to help us out? You could maybe see some sights, visit some distant dimensions, make a lot of really sad souls a bit happier?”

Aradia smiles, well and truly with all of her teeth, and she loves the feeling of breath in her lungs and warmth in her muscles and red blood in her veins.

“And we’ll be alive again,” she says, fingers starting to tug at the hem of her shirt in eagerness, the need to run and jump and go swim in a damn cold lake.

An older Aradia smiles back, replies, “Don’t go trying to procreate, but yes, it’ll be close enough for government work.”

“Ok,” Aradia says. “Ok. I can do that.”

Dave’s behind her, moved from sitting to standing and she didn’t even notice, slips his hand into hers and grins, “It’ll be a goddamn adventure.”

There’s wind at her back and shade to her right and shade to her left and a thin bright strip of sun right down her face. It’s warm as blood and yellow like gold. Aradia laughs, and squeezes her left hand in Dave’s right, and puts her right hand in her older self’s. Aradia says, “I do love adventures,” and they shake on it.

It’s a wide world, and the sky is vast and bright above them.

 


End file.
